Reader Eli Vilker sent me the link to Joe Pompeo’s new article in Vanity Fair, which you can get by clicking on the screenshot below. And Eli added these words with his email:
This is an excellent riposte to people who always argue about regressive Leftists on campus as “just kids who’ll grow out of it”. Now these “woke” kids are entering the workforce and undermining traditional journalistic standards of neutrality and objectivity. As quoted in the article, “this other generation has an expectation that the institution will change to accommodate them”
Now Grania and I always have the argument that Eli referred to: whether the kids will grow out of their Control-Leftism when they enter the work force. Grania’s assumption is that their elders, or the Real World, will disabuse them of some of their fantasies, as well as of their constant demands for “wokeness” and cries of being offended. But I think she’s wrong on two counts. First, much of the media actually tracks the Zeitgeist determined in colleges, because that Zeitgeist has itself filtered upwards from the students to university administrations, who are —except for mine, of course—behaving like censors, helicopter parents, or craven osculators to those who pay tuition. Further, it’s largely those who go to college who become leaders of the next generation, and those most likely to be America’s leaders are those who agitate for change in college.
Now some of that agitation is good, of course, and #NotAllColleges are what Jon Haidt calls “Social Justice Universities” like Middlebury College, Harvard, Brown, or Amherst. But believe me, our future Presidents, tech giants, and newspaper editors are more likely to be drawn from one of these schools than from Liberty University or some forlorn ag school on the prairie.
It’s been evident to me for about a year that the New York Times is becoming more and more aligned with the Regressive Left. This likely reflects the election of Trump, but also the currents in universities that were moving even during Obama’s time. Just look at any front page online, and you’ll see articles conditioned and prompted by intersectionalist Leftism.
So, for example, they’ve hired Lindy West as a columnist, who, to my mind, is not only absolutely predictable in what she says, but can’t write, either. True, they did hire Bari Weiss, a Leftist who condemns the Regressive Left, but she’s been demonized not just by the RL, but by her own colleagues at The Times, as I described in a recent post. The other reporters and editors, it appears, are just looking for a way to get Weiss’s tuchas fired, as she speaks uncomfortable truths about the Left, as when she called out the Chicago Dyke March for banning the Jewish (Gay) Pride flag (a sign of anti-Semitism), and—horrors—actually said some good things about cultural appropriation. The last straw was when Weiss, a young journalist, got to go on Bill Maher’s show twice, giving her a higher profile than other Times writers. You can just sense the jealousy seething among the editors who, on a backchannel discussion site, were ripping Weiss apart for an innocuous tweet about an American skater being an immigrant.
To my mind, the New York Times is converging, ever so slowly, on The Huffington Post. You may say that’s needless alarmism on my part, but read Pompeo’s piece and see if I’m wrong. The main issue described in the piece is the tension between news reporters and op-ed writers like Weiss (described in his piece as a “conservative,” which isn’t true). The former can’t express political opinions in public or on social media, and the latter can. This has caused the schism that, to my mind, threatens to bring down the NYT as America’s best newspaper. Some quotes.
Re Trump’s election:
The new story, after all, was more fascinating, more chaotic—utterly unprecedented. And Trump’s election was the kind of Earth-shattering event that only comes around once or twice in a newsperson’s career. So for someone like Dean Baquet, the Times’s then 60-year-old executive editor, the dominant emotion was exhilaration about this new national epic. But it didn’t go unnoticed that, for some in the newsroom, the journalistic mission was not exactly front of mind. “I just remember younger people with sad faces,” a person who was there told me, describing those employees as generally being in roles that are adjacent to reporting and editing. Baquet remarked to colleagues in the coming days about how surprised he was by that. “He’s thinking, We’ve got a great story on our hands,” my source said. “That was the first indication that a unified newsroom in the age of Trump was going to be a very difficult thing to achieve or maintain.”
Indeed. Journalists have to report the news, regardless of how sad it makes them. If they’re at the HuffPo, they can editorialize with the news like this (by the way, they’re right about Pruitt, but this is not news but editorializing):
or
Take the Watergate affair. While the editorial page of The Washington Post was calling out the administration’s perfidy, those who ultimately brought it down, Woodward and Bernstein, were just reporting the facts. You didn’t see either of those two going on the television to call for Nixon’s impeachment. And that’s the way it should be. Journalists give the facts (granted, they can be slanted a tad; we all know the Times has a Leftist tilt), while the op-eds give us fact-based opinions. But the younger reporters and editors at the Times don’t like that; they really want the paper to be like HuffPo. They want to merge opinion and news, and it has to be anti-Republican.
Much of this schism, as noted above, came from Trump’s election, which I think drove many liberals almost insane:
As with most hot-button topics these days, all roads seem to lead back to the real-estate mogul and erstwhile reality-television fixture who now resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. “I would agree that the question of a generational divide is made more complicated by the fact that it’s happening during the presidency of Donald Trump,” said Times managing editor Joe Kahn in an interview. “If this had been the first term of Hillary Clinton, or a less divisive, less polarizing figure for many members of our own staff, some of the issues that have arisen might not have taken on quite the level of importance or urgency or alarm that they have.” At the same time, said Kahn, the Times“has made it really clear that we consider it crucial to our future that we not become an opposition-news organization. We do not see ourselves, and we do not wish to be seen, as partisan media. That means that the news and opinion divide, and things like social-media guidelines and some of our traditional restrictions on political activity by employees, may feel cumbersome to some people at this point in our evolution.”
To Kahn’s point, the country is in the midst of a unique and restive moment—not least of all for the ever-ubiquitous millennial population—characterized by empowerment and anger and, yes, “wokeness.” Against this backdrop, the Times is arguably changing more rapidly and radically than any other period in its 167-year history, including the ascension earlier this year of its first digital-native publisher, 37-year-old A.G. Sulzberger. Put simply, the Times is working through a complex and fraught makeover in order to become a place that can survive—even if there were no print edition in another 5 or 10 or 20 years. “I have been here a long time,” one veteran editor told me. “The tensions you’re referring to are not just generational. We are all trying to figure out what the Times is in the digital era.”
Given that most people read the paper digitally, and probably spend a lot less time online than on the paper edition, this is a dangerous situation. Ideally, the Times should somehow remain what it was before: a repository of thoughtful and accurate journalism. But can a newspaper keep that when everyone’s attention span is minuscule, and click-bait is what draws the eyes?
Just two more quotes and I’ll leave you to read the piece yourself:
One of the younger, newer Times employees I spoke with boiled down the conflict as follows, with the obvious caveat that there are, of course, “woke” people in the old guard and traditionalists in the younger set. “The olds,” my source said, “feel like the youngs are insufficiently respectful of long-standing journalistic norms, or don’t get that things are the way they are for a reason. The youngs feel like the olds are insufficiently willing to acknowledge the ways in which the world and media landscape have changed, and that our standards and mores should evolve to reflect that.” (Several Times sources emphasized that this dynamic has been around for decades. As Gay Talese once wrote of the 1950s-era Times: “There were philosophical differences dividing older Timesmen who feared that the paper was losing touch with its tradition and younger men who felt trapped by tradition.”)
Similarly, an institutional Times person said, “I think a lot of this younger generation were brought up to believe that it’s very important that their voices be heard, and so I think it’s a bit harder to fit into an institution where it’s less than democratic in some ways. One generation came of age where they entered this esteemed institution and tried to find a way to fit into it, and this other generation has an expectation that the institution will change to accommodate them. That’s the essence of the tension.”
Yes, call me a curmudgeon (well, not in the comments!), and get off my lawn, but I doubt that the NYT will survive if, in its attempt to enter the digital era, it becomes the HuffPo of the intellectual set. Or perhaps it will survive, but it won’t be the same paper that garnered a reputation as “the good gray Times“—one of the world’s best papers. Perhaps this is inevitable given the way people now approach reading (online, no books, nothing too long), but I mourn it. And so, apparently, does managing editor Joe Kahn, who articulates values that are the direct opposite of sites like HuffPo, Salon, BuzzFeed, and VICE (my emphasis):
As Kahn sees it, there’s no “magic-bullet solution,” and he said the Times is making progress on becoming more responsive to the concerns of a much more multi-textured staff than it had 10 years ago. But in terms of how any single employee may be processing the many difficult ramifications of the current era, there was one thing Kahn held firm on. “If you’re a media company, journalism is not about creating safe spaces for people,” he said. “It’s not about democratically reflecting the consensus of the staff about what we say on certain issues. We’re not crowd-sourcing, from our employees, a collective institutional position on Donald Trump.”
Amen!
Taking Lindy West on board is enough to sink any ship.
omg. I tried not to laugh. Really, I did.
Bahahahahahaha.
What a comment. As the Hippies used to say “Heavy, man” !!!
I’m reminded of the old blues phrase: “You’re right, I’m left, she’s gone.”
Sub
All the righteousness that’s fit to print.
Glen Davidson
And today online the BBC has articles like “Reality check: are there too many white politicians?” Or recently one along similar lines asking if the anti-gun student movement was too white.
I get most of my news from BBC because at one time it was the most objective reporting I could find and I liked the professional, serious style. That is changing quickly and I’m afraid I’ll have to look elsewhere. I hope there is an elsewhere.
At this point, I’ve found there really isn’t an “elsewhere.” What I’ve been doing for the last few years now is reading multiple sources from different camps. If I see a story in, say, the NYT, I then search for it at places from the other side, like National Review. Sometimes I’ll find stories that are only reported in outlets from one side, and I’ll just try and do my best to confirm any facts that seem to convenient or seek out missing context. It’s all quite inconvenient and time-consuming, but I haven’t found a better way to do things.
Woke? And now a little cranky, and want a bottle?
And based on their writings, I’d say they need a diaper change as well.
Interesting…one of the left-wing internet hangouts I frequent has been complaining about the Times’ “rightward tilt” since the Trump election.
Anyone who complains about the NYT’s “rightward tilt” has not been reading the NYT.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html
From the consumer side, what I want out of a news organization is mostly the facts reported to me without opinion, and then an opinion page I can read as a supplement. I sure as hell don’t want the two blended together.
No one is forced to be a fact reporter. If you’d prefer to be an opinion writer, go for it, but don’t demand that you want to be a fact reporter and give your opinion also. We have no need for that. Go start your own blog and leave the NYT alone.
One can count on seeing in the hard copy NYT at least once-daily reporting entitled,” News Analysis,” which of course is not in the Op-Ed section. Why give it any such name if it is allegedly fact reporting? (I can do my own analysis of the news.) I perceive – however objectively or subjectively – that it is an opportunity for reporters to slip in their opinions. Even with no such heading, NYT reporters, in describing someone or something in putatively objective reporting – and editors in headlines – not infrequently feel free to insert descriptors like “odd” or “unlikely” (and not quoting someone when doing so).
(One also notes in the NYT Business section – and of course Sports and Arts sections – articles which are obviously opinion. One such business column admonished readers not to get bent out of shape about “planned obsolescence.” I will if I want to.)
A year or so ago, in putatively objective news reporting, a reporter described the (now former) Trump White House security chief as “bullet-headed.” Everyones head is shaped like . . . something, as far as that goes. As a matter of principle and consistency, ought a reader reasonably require the Times to describe the shape of the head (and any other body parts?) of any and every person mentioned in an article? I consequently find myself moderately interested in the physiognomy of any reporter who so holds forth.
I don’t know how NYT defines “News Analysis” but I’ve seen this kind of label applied to articles that are not news reports which tend to report a single event but a more in-depth article that collects several related events and weaves them into a story. Clearly the selection of what to report is subjective and often the thread that ties them together is intended to make some point. However, the intention is to be fact-based and fair. Such articles should clearly not belong on the op-ed page.
But many of the younger generation believe reporting shouldn’t be about facts, but activism (“activist journalism”). They don’t want to be opinion writers, but to use their positions as journalists to influence readers and spread their politics. That’s the big problem: this new breed of reported is not only uninterested in objectivity, but actively resents it and sees it as anathema to their goals.
This is the problem, and it’s much more widespread than just the press: the idea that the “right” politics licenses you to lie, to distort, to punch people. It’s pervasive.
I think a point that might not be getting so much coverage is – newspapers today are attempting to figure out how to survive period. Most of the smaller city papers have not gone away simply because of the generational difficulties with SJWs. Most of the good Journalists had to find other work as the papers went down. I am sure the Times had to reduce staff a great deal. Many papers were purchased by people who were only interested in profit and that does not make it in journalism. The fact of the matter, if we want true journalism and quality newspapers to survive, we are going to need to subsidize them, kind of like PBS. What chance does that have, not much. But is should, because once all the good journalism is gone, your democracy is likely gone as well. You can just tune in to crap like Fox and be happy.
We pay to get most of our TV channels. If we can, we should make the effort to support good journalists by subscribing to their outlets too. At the moment I personally find I subscribe to very few newspapers online because they’re quite expensive in comparison to TV, but if more people do it, eventually the price will go down. We expect to get stuff online for free, which is understandable, but we need to remember that good journalism is integral to a functioning democracy.
Yes, the good quality newspapers that use to be across our land have been decimated since the arrival of the internet. Once the advertisers stopped the papers could no longer compete. We are down to just a few now in the really big cities and even they have had to cut way back. No longer do they have overseas bureaus as they once did. Heck even CNN has cut way back in this area. Once you can no longer afford the quality journalists you end up with the Huff Post type stuff.
Perhaps news outfits like CNN don’t have overseas bureaus now (or have smaller ones) because mobile technology and the internet has allowed virtually anyone to perform most of that function. They work as contractors and simply sell their information to news conglomerators like CNN. Of course, this arrangement isn’t a direct substitute for overseas bureaus. While it is much more efficient and less-expensive, reliability is bound to be a huge issue. On the other hand, most events will be covered by multiple contractors in the field, providing the needed “multiple independent sources”.
I’m a little surprised that the people who should be most able to understand the need for discretion on social media and the reasons behind corporate social media policy seem unable too. Maybe it’s chafing too much with ‘muh precious and unique voice cannot be silenced’.
So where are we supposed to call you a curmudgeon if not in the comments? Asking for a friend.
Jerry has recognised his curmudgeonliness on the topic. Therefore there’s no need for anyone to go on about it. Does your “friend” have woke tendencies that lead them to feel the need to signal their virtue on this matter? 🙂
My friend says it was just a joke but some people take things way too seriously.
There was a smiley face at the end of my comment. Those don’t show up on all platforms in WordPress, so maybe you didn’t see it.
Actually, I didn’t see the smiley face but I didn’t think you were serious but wasn’t absolutely sure. No problems here.
If his friend was “woke,” I imagine he/she would be calling Jerry many worse things than curmudgeon!
Ha ha! Good point! 🙂
Christopher Hitchens called himself a “contrarian” which sounds a tad better to me.
It must be hard for journalists to go from the college environment where one’s opinions are paramount into an environment where you are expected to report the news untainted by those opinions. Journalists have always had this problem but it must be particularly difficult in the current era where Trump’s election practically forces one to choose a side.
Over the last ten years I notice there’s been a gradual shift in my reading. Ten years ago, my go-to source for US politics was the NYT. Now it’s WaPo. I still like them both, but I prefer WaPo. It’s simply that it feels more objective to me.
I really hate this wokeness thing. It’s stupid and counterproductive. To me, their only place is in moving the Overton window. We need more fairness, more diversity, more understanding, and more inclusion. However, the victimisation of those who are doing nothing more than reporting facts the woke crowd don’t like is a step too far.
And the thing about the Washington Post is simply – you have a really rich guy for an owner and he lets the professionals who run the paper do their thing. There is not this pressure to make money and cut, cut cut. This kind of thing hardly exists anymore. If we want to save journalism in the U.S. we will need to pay for it with evil taxes…
So Jeff Bezos is our patron saint of good journalism. No wonder Trump hates him so much. He’s richer, smarter, and not a hateful liar.
And has better hair.
😉
And because there’s a president who doesn’t like honest reporting, Trump is using his bully pulpit to lie about Amazon, which, of course, is owned by the same person who owns WaPo. Their share price has dropped significantly as a result. Billions has been wiped off the value of the company. Absolutely disgusting and outrageous.
Yes and if a normal citizen did what Trump did they would be in big trouble. It is illegal and not allowed. They should really come down on stupid for doing this but probably won’t. At minimum, Amazon should sue him. However, it’s a stand in line affair with all the lawsuits facing him now.
Can the SEC or the like actually censure a sitting president?
I’ve been reading The Atlantic a lot. I don’t know what that says about me. I still like the BBC for world news.
I like the BBC too. There’s coverage of the whole world, and it’s usually good quality as well.
I hope it’s not because of this:
https://boingboing.net/2018/04/04/listen-to-the-atlantics-kevi.html
Well, Ed Yong remains an interesting biology writer.
I’m much more likely to read something David Frum writes.
🙂
During the run up to the election in 2016, the NYT would bash Hillary Clinton mercilessly. Everything was about her email and nothing about her policy positions. For Donald Trump…one of the autumn headlines read something to the effect that Trump “stretches the truth”, rather than calling him an out and out liar. The Times equivocated on anything Trump said, I believe out of fear of being viewed as too left leaning rather than speaking truth to power. I cancelled my subscription to the NYT at that time and now read the Washington Post. BTW, can’t we find a better word than ‘woke’? The English language seems to have done pretty well until now without this new usage.
Hard to forget this, indeed. Didn’t cancel the subscription, though.
“The main issue described in the piece is the tension between news reporters and op-ed writers like Weiss (described in his piece as a ‘conservative,’ which isn’t true).”
I would love to think that this trend hasn’t or won’t infect the newsroom, where the journalists are expected to simply report the facts of a story, but this has not been my experience for two or three years now. I’ve mentioned in the past that I cancelled my nearly fifteen year subscription to this paper (aside from the Saturday edition, as I need my crossword!) because I could no longer ignore the bias I had noticed slowly creeping into their news reporting. I regularly saw stories reported in which certain facts were buried or context entirely excised to give the impression that the story was other than what it truly was, or to keep out anything that might call the narrative of the story into question. Other times, I noticed inconvenient facts and context buried in the final paragraphs of very long stories, and this is by design, as every journalist knows studies have shown that people do not read that far into an article. Headlines would sometimes be misleading, and often editorializing. More and more, I would see quotes severely damaging to a target being attributed to anonymous sources.
The final straw came while I was reading an article (not an editorial) on Lena Headey (the Game of Thrones actress) in the Arts section. At one point, the article talked about how male fans often approach her and tell her their theories about the show — and it wasn’t suggested that they did so out of any desire but to express their admiration and fandom — and the writer said that such interactions were an assault of “mansplaining” on the poor actress that she had to constantly suffer. The word had no quotes and was used entirely seriously, in a manner suggesting that this was a simple fact that could not be described otherwise, and something that inflicted horrible suffering on Ms. Headey, who simply could not escape this result of the patriarchy that oppresses her.
I find I usually agree with Grania, but this time I am with Jerry. But then, I’m a curmudgeon:)
The tendentiousness of much of the NYT is now egregious. Even long time NYT readers I know are griping. This is a disaster for the NYT “brand”. Prestige lost is hard to regain.
When we lose the press, we lose our democracy. It’s that simple. It’s bad enough that, everywhere we turn, people are more interested in making sure everyone’s feelings are ok rather than speaking the truth and doing what’s right, but losing our institution of accountability and truth to ideology? Well, you might as well just start practicing your goose step now.
I also canceled my NYT subscription. I now get my local paper and the WSJ. Five free monthly links in four browsers will cover any points of interest I miss.
Most people don’t go to the front page of news sources nowadays anyway. They get their news from social media, and sometimes click through to read past the headline:
http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/
But still, after reading about the front page being all SJW-ish, I decided to take a look.
I browse the NYT front page every morning, and I never thought it was losing its touch.
Today I found a only small proportion that could be characterized as SJWish. Otherwise, it was business as usual. There were articles about Trump, Facebook, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination & legacy, China’s tariffs on American products, carfentanil, e-cigarettes, Tiger Woods’s physical ailments, tutors who provide emotional support, illiteracy amongst Hassidic children, snow monkeys of Japan, hate crimes against Albanians in Kosovo, book reviews… Just the kind of thing you could read in the print version. I don’t see a major shift.
And the editorial board (and there SHOULD be editorials IMHO) wrote an editorial about what Trump’s charges of “fake news” are doing to journalism, and the attacks on journalism around the world.
I browse the headlines of NYT & WaPo every morning over coffee, and I just don’t see dangerous journalistic activism. There are 14 regular opinion columnists listed (Lindy West isn’t one of them), and only three of them are women. Predictably, one is in the ghetto of feminist journalism, but at least the other two are serious writers. There’s only one black columnist, no Asian men, no columnists who write about LGBQT issues, so they aren’t even being SWJ-ish in their editorial hiring.
I’m not concerned about the NYT’s standards. I’m more concerned about the Hassidic children who don’t learn how to read because they’re getting religious instruction instead of a real education:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/opinion/yeshivas-literacy-new-york.html
Whoops! I didn’t realize that link would do that! Sorry!
Thank you, lady atheist. It’s nice to read some good fact-biased reporting!
Sorry – that should be ‘fact-based’, though a bias towards facts is surely a good thing!
Regarding when a generation transitions from being ‘young enough to know everything’ to whatever (presumably more moderated by real world experience) adult worldview they’ll have, I don’t know that entry into the workforce is an obvious marker. Look at the Summer of Love generation – they were still at discos in the 70s, and then by the 80s, it was a totally different story. As time goes by people tend to have increasingly more skin in the game(kids, spouses, mortgages, and so on); transition to being cared-for to being responsible for care-taking (be it for a company, children, or aging parents); and have much more experience in how youthful idealism tends to play out in the real world. I think this is why there are so many quotes about “If you’re not X at 20 you have no heart, if you’re not Y at 40 you have no head.”
I *wish* they were going more social justice rather than conservative, though this should not be construed as anything to do with the “SJW” nonsense. (Any more than the DPRK is democratic, anyway.)
“They want to merge opinion and news.”
With physical paper sales at an all-time low and papers laying off staff by the droves, the RegLeft kids you decry are simply following the incredibly lucrative model founded by Faux News. The goal is not to merge opinion and news, but to replace the one with the other.
That’s needless alarmism on your part.
For evidence: what ladyatheist said.
And what an overwrought piece Pompeo’s is.